all about audience research in museums and other cultural institutions

Monday, May 28, 2007

Writing Survey Questions

My offsider, Pauline, is embarking on the new world of question writing as we develop surveys for our Museum Shop and Science in the Suburbs. This got me thinking about what I would recommend as resources for question-writing.

As mentioned before, Judy Diamond's 1999 book Practical Evaluation Guide: tools for museums and other informal educational settings (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press) is a good starting point. For general advice on sampling and suggested questions for a whole range of areas try:* McManus, P. (1991). Towards Understanding the Needs of Museum Visitors. In G. Lord & B. Lord (Eds.), The Manual of Museum Planning (pp. 35-52). London: HMSO. (I think there's a newer version of this book and it's in our Research Library).

You could also look at general social research texts - one I have used is:* de Vaus, D. (1991). Surveys in Social Research (3rd ed.). London: UCL Press, especially Chapter 6 (also in our Research Library).

1 comment:

Questionnaires are widely used in educational and social research. They have the advantage of providing a large amount of information for relatively little time investment, and, if well designed, can be a fairly rigorous way of collecting data for further analysis and comparability across a population. Questions used can be either open-ended, where an interviewee responds in their own words, or closed, where respondents are provided with a set of choices. Closed questions include yes/no responses; tick boxes; rating scales (also called Likert-scales); agree/disagree statements or forced-choice responses.

Rating scales are commonly used in questionnaires. de Vaus (1991) identified three advantages in using rating scales. First, they encourage respondents to make a choice based on how strongly they feel about a complex subject area. Second, they increase validity by adding to data obtained from open-ended questions. Finally, reliability is met through obtaining a number of different sets of measures for similar question areas.

One aspect of rating scales is to decide between using a five or a seven points in the scale. In a review of this literature Cox (1980) concluded that ‘… the magic number seven plus or minus two appears to be a reasonable range for the optimal number of response alternatives’ (p.420). He also added that the number chosen needed to be enough to obtain the required information, yet not too refined to cause errors.

Another issue in rating scales is the potential for bias in designing the questions. For example, participants may give a biased response to a scale because of the way statements were ordered, responding more positively to statements that are asked at the beginning and more negatively later. This can be overcome by rotating questions and careful design of wording.

What is the audience research blog?

Hi everyone. I'm conducting a blogging experiment - will this blog become a way for those of us who work in museum evaluation and audience research to share our work with the world, rather than via email to our contacts as happens currently?

My challenge to you, my colleagues, is to use this blog to post questions, answer queries and share experiences. I look forward to this adventure with a mixed sense of excitement and anxiety!

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